"water" sounds I liked: All of them were good! Man, water1 sounded like a full-fledged tropical storm! Water2 was great in the way that the sound of the water itself was brought into greater prominence (i.e., there wasn't as much background noise with this one, allowing more focus on the water sound). And water3 was a good balance of both 1 and 2. Only thing I would say here: it would be cool to have some water/rain sounds that were a little more subdued in addition to the intense ones; you know, for like when it's not raining super hard (misting or drizzling).

"step" sounds I liked:step4: I like the way this one isn't quite so "punchy." Instead, it's more drawn out.twig3: my favorite of the twig sounds.wood2wood3: 2 and 3 feel like good all-around wood step sounds for regular movement.wood4wood5: 4 and 5 seem like good ones to use for sneaking/slow movement.

"other" sounds I liked:book_close3: my favorite of the book sounds.clank1: awesome clank!click1click2: both click 1 and 2 sound great.cloth1: I like the wavy sound cloth1 has, and it's my favorite of the cloth sounds, but it sounds slightly too drawn out. If it was like a second shorter it would be perfect.cricket1cricket2door_close1money1: the best of the money!page_turn2page_turn3: all of these are good, but my favorites are 2 and 3.

Thank you for the feedback! If there is broader interest in this (and you think the sounds are good enough for DaggerXL), we should make a list of all the needed sound files, so I could work on them a bit more systematic.

I'm out for recording more stuff like squeaking doors and wind howling (as they are quite important for a dungeon crawler), but those are very difficult to record. I'm also trying on water droplets to get a lighter and more distinct water sound, but again this can be problematic because water drops are so quiet and even with the Tascam DR-05, which is praised for a low noise level, recording them is not easy.

jet800 wrote:I think you could ask Brendan_ to make and maintain some kind of to-do list like he did for textures.

Before we can make a list, we need to know what sounds are needed. And before we know what sounds are needed, we'll need to take a look at the DAGGER.SND file...

After delving into the DAGGER.SND file in the Arena 2 main folder, I was thoroughly confused. It seems that when you import the raw sound file for Daggerfall (DAGGER.SND) into a program like Audacity, it plays all of the sounds as one "song." In other words, there are apparently no individual sound files within the DAGGER.SND (like door_001, door_002, etc.), just one very large one. How Daggerfall's engine goes through this compilation and picks out sounds to play is way beyond me, but it will certainly not make finding out what sounds you need any easier.

After some more web searching, I managed to find a couple more promising leads. One is a program on the UESP wiki's downloads page called DaggerSound v0.1 (it can be found under "Editors and Viewers" on this page: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:Files). When I extracted the DAGGER.SND with this program, it split the DAGGER.SND into 459 numbered, individual .wav files! However, there seems to be some sort of a problem with the way these .wav's are encoded: the only way I was able to play these files was by using Audacity's "raw import" function (like I did with the DAGGER.SND file). This was a step forward from what I had before, though, as I am now able to play individual sounds by themselves. I will do some more experimenting and see if I can convert these files into a format playable by modern media players (like VLC).

The other lead is on a forum, where a member seems to have used Audacity to open the DAGGER.SND like I did at first, but then went on to individually cut and paste each sound into separate sound files. He then made the compilation of files available for download (here is a link: http://www.vg-esource.comshowthread.php?tid=21292). However, his post made it seem like he may have missed a few sounds, and so I'm not so sure how reliable his compilation is. Still, all of the files are named and arranged in folders, which is obviously easier than going through 459 numbered sound files to find out what they are.

jet800 wrote:I think you could ask Brendan_ to make and maintain some kind of to-do list like he did for textures.

I'm always flattered to be tapped for project management.

SpecialK has good questions. And we have to consider whether all sounds in DAGGER.SND are even used (DF's assets weren't cleaned up very well before going gold).

My suggestion is to use the aforementioned DaggerSound and do a batch convert with Audacity to make the 459 files easy to work with in remakes.

There's no point remaking sounds that Daggerfall doesn't actually use. There's a smart way to find out which ones can get called, and if anyone is smart enough to figure it out programmatically, it would save someone a very long, exhausting manual exploration.Alternatively, the sound artist can just throw up their hands and remake all 459 sounds.

Enlisting the help of DaggerSound's author, Josef Šustek (Paar), may also be helpful. I don't know who that is, and no contact info was included in the readme.txt but perhaps someone at UESP knows how to find him.My guess is that there's some wholly proprietary data in the .SND file telling where each sound begins and ends. Alternatively, the file is like a sprite which FALL.EXE includes the list of times when sounds begin/end ....but I doubt it. There is a DaggerSound Packer, and I bet it allows sounds longer that the originals to be packed.

I don't know if I can or want to remake all sounds. Even if many of them aren't used, hundreds remain. And many of those are hard to remake with my limited options and experience.Purely artificial sounds (a 'zombie moan' or 'spell cast' for example) are out of my league to create. My personal aim would be to replace the most-used sounds (walking, weapon swing, inventory click,...) and add a little more variety to them. It would even be an option to reduce the quality of the sounds a little to make them blend better with the original files. To make it a little more unified, Lucius could put in an option to lower the sample rate for sound effects to 16k or something. Those scratchy 8-bit wav sounds certainly also have some charm to them.

I'm not trying to sound lazy, but my physics studying is taking large amounts of time and I just don't want to agree to make something I probably won't finish any soon. I'd rather stick with the sounds I have created (and a few more, possibly) and put them in shape to be included shortly after the beta.